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a malfunctioning escalator in the airline's terminal of recourse against the airline, even if the airline recklessly disregarded its duty to keep the escalator in proper repair. The Convention's preemptive effect on local law, however, extends no further than the Convention's own substantive scope. A carrier, therefore, is subject to liability under local law for passenger injuries occurring before "any of the operations of embarking or disembarking," Art. 17. Tseng raised the concern that carriers will escape liability for their intentional torts if passengers are not permitted to pursue personal injury claims outside of the Convention's terms. But this Court has already cautioned that the definition of "accident" under Article 17 is an "unusual event . . . external to the passenger," and that "[t]his definition should be flexibly applied." Saks, 470 U. S., at 405 (emphasis added). The parties chose not to pursue here the question whether an "accident" occurred, for an affirmative answer would still leave Tseng unable to recover under the treaty; she sustained no "bodily injury" and could not gain compensation under Article 17 for her solely psychic or psychosomatic injuries. Pp. 169-172.
(c) The Article 17 drafting history is consistent with this Court's understanding of the preemptive effect of the Convention. Although a preliminary draft of the Convention made carriers liable " 'in the case of death, wounding, or any other bodily injury suffered by a traveler,' " Saks, 470 U. S., at 401, the later draft that prescribed what is now Article 17 narrowed airline liability to encompass only bodily injury caused by an "accident." It is improbable that, at the same time the drafters narrowed the conditions of liability in Article 17, they intended, in Article 24, to permit passengers to skirt those conditions by pursuing claims under local law. Inspecting the drafting history, the Second Circuit stressed a proposal by the Czechoslovak delegation to state in the treaty that, in the absence of a stipulation in the Convention itself, the provisions of laws and national rules relative to carriage in each signa-tory state would apply. That proposal was withdrawn upon amendment of the Convention's title to read "Convention For The Unification Of Certain Rules Relating To International Transportation By Air." (Emphasis added.) The British House of Lords found this drafting history inconclusive, reasoning that the inclusion of the word "certain" in the Convention's title indicated that the Convention was concerned with certain rules only, not with all the rules relating to international carriage by air; that the Convention is a partial harmonization, directed to the particular issues with which it deals, including a carrier's liability to passengers for personal injury; and that, given the Convention's overall objective to ensure uniformity, the Czechoslovak delegation may have meant only to underscore that national law controlled
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